A commuter town is a populated area with residents who normally work elsewhere, but in which they live, eat and sleep. The term additionally implies a community that has little commercial or industrial activity beyond a small amount of locally oriented retail business.

A "commuter town" may be called by many other terms: "exurb" (short for "extra-urban"), "bedroom community" (Canada and northeastern U.S.), "bedroom town", "bedroom suburb" (US), "dormitory town", "dormitory suburb", or less commonly a "dormitory village" (Britain/Commonwealth/Ireland).[citation needed] In Japan, it may be referred to with the wasei-eigo coinage "bed town" (ベッドタウン,beddotaun).[1]

Camarillo, California, a typical U.S. bedroom community made up almost entirely of homes, schools and retail outlets

Suburbs and commuter towns often coincide, but are not synonymous. Similar to college town, resort town and mill town, the term commuter town describes the municipality's predominant economic function. A suburb, in contrast, is a community of lesser size, density, political power and/or commerce comparative to a nearby community that is usually of greater economic importance. A town's economic function may change, for example when improved transport brings commuters to industrial suburbs or railway towns in search of suburban living. Some suburbs, for example Teterboro, New Jersey and Emeryville, California, remained industrial when they became surrounded by commuter towns; many commuters work in such industrial suburbs but few reside in them; hence, they are not commuter towns.

As a general rule, suburbs are developed in areas adjacent to a main employment center, such as a town or a city, but may or may not have many jobs locally, whereas bedroom communities have few local businesses, and most residents who have jobs commute to employment centers some distance away. Commuter towns may be in rural or semi-rural areas, with a ring of green space separating them from the larger city or town. Where urban sprawl and conurbation have erased clear lines among towns and cities in large metropolitan areas, this is not the case.

Commuter towns can arise for a number of different reasons. Sometimes, as in Sleepy Hollow, New York or Tiburon, California, a town loses its main source of employment, leaving its residents to seek work elsewhere. In other cases, a pleasant small town, such as Warwick, New York, over time attracts more residents but not large businesses to employ them, requiring denizens to commute to employment centers. Another cause, particularly relevant in the American South and West, is the rapid growth of once-small cities. Owing largely to the earlier creation of the Interstate Highway System, the greatest growth was seen by the sprawling metropolitan areas of these cities. As a result, many small cities[which?] were absorbed into the suburbs of these larger cities.

In certain major European cities, such as Berlin and London,[citation needed] commuter towns were founded in response to bomb damage sustained during World War II. Residents were relocated to semi-rural areas within a 50-mile (80 km) radius, firstly because much inner city housing had been destroyed, and secondly in order to stimulate development away from cities as the industrial infrastructure shifted from rail to road. Around London, several towns – such as Basildon, Crawley, Harlow, and Stevenage – were built for this purpose by the Commission for New Towns.[citation needed]

Where commuters are wealthier and small town housing markets weaker than city housing markets, the development of a bedroom community may raise local housing prices and attract upscale service businesses in a process akin to gentrification. Long-time residents may be displaced by new commuter residents due to rising house prices. This can also be influenced by zoning restrictions in urbanized areas that prevent the construction of suitably cheap housing closer to places of employment.

In the United States, it is common for commuter towns to create disparities in municipal tax rates. When a commuter town collects few business taxes, residents must pay the brunt of the public operating budget in higher property or income taxes. Such municipalities may scramble to encourage commercial growth once an established residential base has been reached.

A 2014 study by the British Office for National Statistics found that commuting also affects wellbeing. Commuters are more likely to be anxious, dissatisfied and have the sense that their daily activities lack meaning than those who don’t have to travel to work even if they are paid more.[3]

In Belgium, the development of traditional rural Flemish towns surrounding Brussels into commuter towns is causing major language tensions, as most of the newcoming commuters are French-speaking or even international English-speaking families with no attachment to the Flemish roots. The Flemish movement in the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde area, with demands such as the strict enforcement of the Dutch language (restaurants with bilingual menus have been assaulted by activists, etc.) can be analyzed as a reaction against gentrification caused by the arrival of those wealthier non-Dutch speakers working in international companies, national administration or the European Parliament.

The word exurb (that is, "extra-urban") was coined by Auguste Comte Spectorsky, in his 1955 book The Exurbanites, to describe the ring of prosperous communities beyond the suburbs that are commuter towns for an urban area.[4] Most exurbs serve as commuter towns, but most commuter towns are not exurban.

Exurbs vary in wealth and education level. In the United States, exurban areas typically have much higher college education levels than closer-in suburbs, though this is not necessarily the case in other countries. They also typically have average incomes much higher than nearby rural counties, and some have some of the highest median household incomes in their respective metropolitan area. However, depending on local circumstances, some exurbs have higher poverty levels than suburbs nearer the city.

Today's exurbs are composed of small neighborhoods in otherwise lightly developed areas, towns, and (comparatively) small cities. Some lie in the outer suburbs of an urbanized area, but a few miles of rural, wooded, or agricultural land separates many exurbs from the suburbs. Exurbs may have originated independently of the major city to which many residents commute. Most consist almost exclusively of commuters and lack the historical and cultural traditions of more established cities. Many early 20th century exurbs were organized on the principles of the garden city movement.

Many suburbs within a metropolitan city proper enjoyed their greatest growth in the post-World War II period, after which growth slowed for several decades; however, since the 1990s extensive development has occurred outside of cities. There have also been significant growth differences between inside and outside metro boundaries; many developments typical of exurbs, such as the proliferation of big box retailers, lie just on the outside, due to older suburbs' being restricted by inner-city land-use politics while communities outside are free to develop and grow.

"They begin as embryonic subdivisions of a few hundred homes at the far edge of beyond, surrounded by scrub. Then, they grow – first gradually, but soon with explosive force – attracting stores, creating jobs and struggling to keep pace with the need for more schools, more roads, more everything. And eventually, when no more land is available and home prices have skyrocketed, the whole cycle starts again, another 15 minutes down the turnpike."

Others argue that exurban environments, such as those that have emerged in Oregon over the last 40 years as a result of the state's unique land use laws, have helped to protect local agriculture and local businesses by creating strict urban growth boundaries that encourage greater population densities in centralized towns, while slowing or greatly reducing urban and suburban sprawl into agricultural and timber land.[9]